


The Interpretation of Dreams

by notagarroter (redbuttonhole)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Freudian Elements, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 14:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11015157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbuttonhole/pseuds/notagarroter
Summary: A Freudian reading of The Abominable Bride





	1. The Interpretation of Dreams

 

  


In TAB, Sherlock makes reference to "an Viennese alienist".  "[Alienist](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alienist)" is an archaic word for a doctor who treats the insane, or what we would now call a psychiatrist, which makes this a clear reference to the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, who was busy developing his psychoanalytic practice and theories in the 1890s in Austria.  In this scene, Sherlock is complaining about John asking questions that are inappropriate from anyone but one's psychoanalyst.  But is there another reason Sherlock might have Freud on the brain?           

Possibly it's because Freud was notoriously [experimenting with cocaine](http://www.heretical.com/freudian/coca1884.html) at almost exactly the same time the original Sherlock Holmes was concocting his 7% solution.  

  


Or perhaps because most of TAB is an elaborate, extended dream sequence, and one of Freud's most significant works from this era is called [The Interpretation of Dreams](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/freud/sigmund/interpretation-of-dreams/complete.html).

* * *

For Freud, dream interpretation is a way of accessing the unconscious mind.  What does Freud mean by the unconscious?  According to the theory, the unconscious is a part of the mind kept hidden from us under most circumstances.  Freud believed that humans are excellent secret-keepers, and there is no one we are more inclined to deceive than ourselves.  The unconscious mind holds all of our darkest desires, fears, and obsessions.  It affects our daily lives and the choices we make, and yet we only get occasional glimpses of its workings.  

Freud argues that dream analysis is one method of uncovering the secrets of the unconscious.  Would Sherlock Holmes agree?  It's tempting to assume that Sherlock would dismiss Freud's ideas as a lot of untestable, pseudo-scientifc blather (plenty of real humans have!).  TAB, however, gives us some indications that Sherlock is at least willing to play with Freud's approach.  

Freud's interest in dreams comes from the idea that in sleep, the mind lets down some of its carefully constructed defenses, and allows usually hidden material to rise to the surface (if only in weirdly altered forms). If we believe Sherlock's claim that he deliberately self-administered a cocktail of drugs in order to unearth clues and make connections about Moriarty's death, well...  that sounds like a pretty similar approach.  

That Sherlock should be interested in navigating the unconscious is itself a bit surprising.  In Freud's understanding, the unconscious mind is totally amoral, irrational, chaotic, and pleasure-focused – in other words, everything Sherlock Holmes consciously abhors.  Nevertheless, Sherlock appears to recognize that the key to Moriarty's return is already contained in his own mind, though inaccessible by normal means.  This is what Mycroft means when he says **"The Mind Palace is a memory technique."**   

  


The mind palace is a mnemonic device for accessing memories using the conscious mind. What Sherlock is doing in TAB – digging deep into unconscious mind for repressed thoughts and memories – is very different.

In order to understand what Sherlock uncovers in TAB, it's helpful to know a bit about how Freud approaches dream interpretation. For Freud, dreams are incredibly personal and dream imagery is built out of the objects and experiences specific to the patient.  There may be symbolic resonances, but they can't be universalized.  It is NOT about simple, generic symbolic readings, i.e. “if you dream about fish that means good luck.”  Similarly, he avoids trying to read the whole dream as a coherent narrative and finding meaning in that.  It's more productive to take every object, character, event, and impression in a dream separately than to try to make sense of the whole.  This involves talking to a patient and getting to know them well enough to tease out the repressed anxieties and desires that may be represented in altered form in their dream.  Since we don't have Sherlock on the couch in front of us, we can't exactly pick at his brain to find hidden associations.  Instead, we have to rely on what we already know of his character from previous episodes and maybe a dash of ACD canon.

Another caveat: Freud specifically talks about fictional dreams and how little they generally resemble real dreams.  Fictional dreams usually contain glaringly obvious symbols because they are the creations of conscious minds, not unconscious, repressed ones.  In TAB we clearly have a fictional dream constructed by a couple of conscious minds: Sherlock's dream in TAB is WAY more coherent and complete than real dreams normally are.  (Necessarily so – if the dream had been as bizarre and incoherent as a real dream, it would have been unwatchable as a story.)  So we must be careful of getting carried away with our analysis.  That said, the fact that the dream includes a direct reference to Freud suggests that writers were expecting and even encouraging a Freudian-style interpretation of their invented dream.  We owe it to them to at least give it a shot!

In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud puts forward the theory that every dream is the expression of an unconscious wish.  This is an extension of his theory of the Pleasure Principle, which states that all human action is governed by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.  In dreams, we can do whatever we want, so naturally we would seek out pleasures unavailable to us in waking life.  While in some cases (sex dreams, food dreams), the dreamer's pleasurable wish may be obvious, in the case of anxiety dreams and nightmares, the wish has been disguised because our conscious minds find it shameful for some reason.  For example, if you have a test tomorrow, you might dream that a million little obstacles prevent you from getting to the test. People normally interpret this as anxiety about getting to the test on time, but Freud claims this dream is really the expression of your wish not to take the test at all.  

So going by this theory, what might be the wish at the heart of TAB?  TAB contains a nightmare scenario where Sherlock fails to prevent the murder of a client's husband.  

  


Read simply, this could be an expression of Sherlock's anxiety over failing at his profession.  Read as the fulfillment of a wish, however, we might conclude that Sherlock actually _wants_ Sir Eustace eliminated because he has repressed desires for Eustace's wife, Lady Carmichael.  And (Johnlockers, cover your eyes!) there is plenty of support for this reading in the dream: Sherlock directly accuses Sir Eustace of being unworthy of his wife, John later suggests that Sherlock has taken a fancy to her, and Sherlock himself – despite all his denials – admits that she has **"admirably high arches"**.

But all of this is still surface interpretation and doesn't get us close to the deeper levels of the dream. According to Freud, when the mind has something it feels guilty or uncomfortable about, it will go to extraordinary lengths to bury the idea and keep this repressed material from becoming conscious.  

Freud gives the example of what he calls "kettle logic".  This comes from a story about a man who is accused by his neighbor of having broken a borrowed kettle.  The man replies that  
1) the kettle isn't broken  
2) it was already broken when he borrowed it  
3) he never borrowed the kettle at all.  
Any one of these justifications might make sense, but together they become absurd.  This is the way logic works in dreams: these kinds of excessive, overlapping, and contradictory rationalizations are a sign that there is a submerged idea or desire that the dreamer isn't ready to face yet.  We see this "kettle logic" at various points in the TAB dream, but most frequently it occurs whenever the subject of Moriarty comes up.

  


When Sherlock asks himself, **"How could he survive?"** , Dream!John immediately replies **" _She_ , you mean"** – a sign that Sherlock's mind is trying to paper over the momentary inconsistency and distract Sherlock from the buried content of the dream.  And again:

  


The "miss me" note appears out of nowhere on Sir Eustace's corpse, and its message bears no relevance to the case at hand.  

Then in the Diogenes Club, when Sherlock says, **"His body was never recovered,"** Dream!Mycroft replies, **"To be expected when one pushes a maths professor over a waterfall,"** even though that's not relevant to the modern mystery Sherlock's actually trying to unravel.  

But Sherlock’s dream self participates in this misdirection too.  Sherlock says, **"He’s trying to distract me, to derail me,"** presumably from the "real" case of Mrs Ricoletti. But in fact, Ricoletti doesn't matter at all.  The whole Ricoletti case was only ever intended as a tool to get him closer to Moriarty.  

Within the dream, the only one who really gets this game of repression and revelation is Moriarty himself.  Sherlock tells Moriarty that he chose to come here, and Moriarty replies, **"Not true. You know that’s not true,"** suggesting that they both know nothing happens in this dream space without Sherlock wishing for it.  Then Moriarty proceeds to lecture Sherlock on what we've called "kettle logic".  He points out the logical impossibility of him showing up at the scene of Sir Eustace's murder.  He emphasizes all the points that don't add up, that don't make sense.  He insistently reminds Sherlock that the whole Ricoletti case is little more than a screen over what really draws Sherlock: Moriarty himself.

  


But _why_ is Moriarty's appearance in 221b, in the crypt, and at the waterfall a fulfillment of Sherlock's unconscious wish?

There are a lot of ways we could take this.  The most transparent is that Sherlock needs to solve the mystery of Moriarty's apparent reappearance, and for that, he needs to consult Moriarty.  That makes sense, but it's a little dull, and it’s not clear why Sherlock’s mind would go to such lengths to disguise this motivation.  

The most fannishly appealing explanation is that Sherlock wants Moriarty for ~sex stuff~, but can't admit it.  And hey, let's not pretend there isn't a TON of evidence for this reading:  

  


Plus, it would be pretty typical of Freud's patients to be repressing sexual desires with a very inappropriate person: an arch-enemy, say, or better yet, a corpse.  So far, still pretty obvious.  But what if we went deeper still...  Is there anything _else_?

Oh, yes. 


	2. The Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part II of a A Freudian reading of The Abominable Bride

In the previous chapter, I talked about Freud's theory that every dream is the expression of a wish.  If so, what is the unconscious wish hidden in Sherlock's drug-fueled dream in TAB?

Sherlock's in kind of an unusual situation here, because where most of us dream as an accidental side-effect of sleeping, Sherlock has consciously _set out_ to have this dream to serve a particular purpose.  According to Sherlock (when conscious), the purpose of this whole exercise is to figure out whether it's possible for Moriarty to have survived their encounter on the roof of Barts.  

  


 

So that's Sherlock's conscious wish.  But what about his unconscious?

Officially, the question Sherlock is asking in TAB is, "How could Moriarty return from the dead?"  But underneath that question, I want to suggest a deeper concern of Sherlock's: **"Why did Moriarty kill himself?"**   

* * *

 

In a way, Sherlock's world would make more sense if Moriarty did fake his death, just as Sherlock did.  We might not know _how_ , but we would certainly understand _why_.  But if Moriarty really and truly did kill himself just to force Sherlock's hand on that rooftop...  the real mystery is, _why_?  What pleasure or satisfaction could Moriarty hope to gain from all his carefully laid plans if he is dead?

  


 

As many other meta-writers have eloquently observed, Sherlock has personal reasons to be interested in this question: there have been many indications throughout the show that Sherlock has at times considered suicide.  

  


 

He might well believe that understanding Moriarty's motivations could help him better understand his own.

But how could suicide be the fulfillment of an unconscious wish?  According to Freud, wishes are supposed to be about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, right?

Well, this is where I need to complicate that idea a little. Because it turns out, Freud didn't stand by the ideas in _The Interpretation of Dreams_ all his life. _Interpretation of Dreams_ was written early in his career.  Years later, towards the end, Freud posited the existence of something he referred to as The Death Drive.  He invented this idea to account for the fact that, over the course of his career, he ran into a lot of human behaviors that did not seem to fit his model of pleasure-seeking/pain-avoiding.  Why, Freud asked, do people sometimes do things that cannot bring them any pleasure, and actually cause them more harm than good?  

In his book _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_ , Freud guesses (and believe me, this idea remains plenty controversial) that there might be some other drive competing with the Pleasure Principle, and causing us to seek our own destruction.  The reason why this might be and the mechanism for how it might work are pretty flimsy, as even Freud acknowledges.  He's really just putting this forward as a hypothesis for discussion.  But whether or not this is a real drive that exists, it may nevertheless be of interest to Sherlock as he contemplates Moriarty's apparent suicide.  

And indeed, the conversation between Sherlock and Dream!Moriarty is haunted throughout by the specter of death.

  


 

> **MORIARTY: That’s all people really are, you know: dust waiting to be distributed.**

This idea actually gets very close to Freud's theory of the death drive – that people are irresistibly drawn to the state that they are destined to become: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  

  


 

The cannibalism angle just adds a disturbing element of pleasure to the idea of destruction.  It suggests that death itself serves a pleasurable purpose—that it can feed our secret urges as much as other physical indulgences.  

  


 

Dream!Moriarty goes even further than Freud, suggesting that death and pleasure might not be opposing drives at all, but inextricably linked.  Death _is_ pleasure...  and maybe pleasure is itself a kind of death.  

Which brings us to another player in Sherlock's dream who has something to tell him (and us) about the relationship between pleasure and death:

  


 

Dream!Mycroft gives us a few more clues to the mystery at the heart of Sherlock's unconscious.  On a simple level, we get John's admonition that Mycroft's gluttonous behavior is unhealthy and, pleasurable though it may be, could result in his early death. This falls in neatly with Freud's early theory of life as a balance between pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, and could be construed as merely a warning to avoid pleasurable excess.  

But what's particularly interesting is the way Mycroft doesn't balk at the threat of death, but embraces it.  Like dream!Moriarty, Mycroft isn't interested in avoiding death or even ignoring it.  He is actively courting it.

  


 

In fact, one gets the idea that chasing death (i.e., the death drive) may actually be the greater motivator for Mycroft than whatever dubious pleasure he receives from devouring three plum puddings in a sitting.  

  


 

Some readers have read elements of this scene as foreshadowing Mycroft's death in some future episode, but it's important to remember that this Mycroft has very little to do with the actual character.  Instead, he has everything to do with _Sherlock_ 's repressed desires, anxieties, and fixations.  

Despite Sherlock's grand plan to use this dream to solve a real life mystery, ultimately a dream can only lead the dreamer back to himself.  As Dream!Moriarty insistently reminds Sherlock, there is no new information to be gleaned from a dream:

  


 

In other words, a dream can only give very limited information about someone else – a regurgitation of what the dreamer already knows.  The real revelations are necessarily going to be about Sherlock himself.

Thus, the Mycroft figure in the dream is really just a tool to allow Sherlock to investigate his own repressed urges without admitting to them. It's not really about Mycroft's weight or his pleasure or his health, but about Sherlock's repressed desires and what might happen if he gave into them.  

And what are those desires?  Drugs?  Food?  Sex?  Love?  I'd argue: yes, all of the above.  Dream!Mycroft is the literalization of Sherlock's fears about what might become of him if he lost control and allowed himself to indulge in any or all of his various urges.  Sherlock fears he could become something grotesque – too big, too much.  

  


 

Perhaps even to the point of death.

Or is that death not merely an unfortunate side effect of indulgence, but what Sherlock ultimately desires most of all? Sherlock, who takes drugs that "usually" aren't fatal, and who fantasizes about jumping into an open grave?

  


 

Sherlock, who ends his dream by throwing himself, alone, off of a waterfall: 

  


 

A triumphant moment within the context of the show, but surely a somewhat morbid one as well.  

Why does he do it?  Yes, he says he **“always survives a fall"**.  But he is also subtly invoking the common superstition that [if you die in a dream, you won't wake up](http://psychiclibrary.com/beyondBooks/death-and-dying-dreams/).  This is no idle risk for Sherlock, as we know that in real life, he is actually overdosing on a drug cocktail.  There is a very real threat that he won't survive this "fall". 

We don't get a really firm answer to this "final" problem – indeed, I doubt one is possible.  But there may be a hint in Sherlock's certainty at the end of TAB that Moriarty really is dead.  That suggests that Sherlock’s unconscious has convinced him death did have a compelling appeal for Moriarty, against all logic.  And if for Moriarty, why not for Sherlock too?


End file.
